Publisher Conduct Guidelines

Outlines certain abusive behaviors we need our publisher partners to avoid. It's a great idea to read this from time to time.

Publisher Conduct Guidelines

We have outlined below several sensitive issues (or outright abuse) that we feel would jeopardize our working relationship with our publishers. The goal of this guideline is to protect the customers' shopping experience, promote the interest of all publishers and to allow us to be rewarded with the repeat purchases of customers we have attracted to the store.

We are not attempting to control the content of your titles; we only wish to have a fair environment to sell your titles and a professional relationship with you built on cooperation and mutual respect.

Quality of titles: The quality of your titles and cover images directly affects the quality of our store and our customers' shopping experiences. Please see the link to our standards guide from your publisher hub for details.

Pricing: We expect fair treatment on the pricing of your titles. Please price your titles as low at our store as you do anywhere else; we understand that short-term sales on backlist titles can vary between stores temporarily (for up to a week or so), but having titles constantly "on sale" elsewhere for cheaper or pricing them differently upon initial release does not constitute fair treatment in our view. Likewise, including extra content for no extra cost in alternate versions made available elsewhere is not fair treatment.

Release schedule: We expect that if you put together a title that you wish to sell at our store, that you release that title on our store within 24 hours of releasing it elsewhere.

Links: We ask that you put a link to our store on your website. In turn, we offer consumers a link to your website on each of your title detail pages. We do not currently allow offsite links within a title's description text, but can make exceptions to that on a case by case basis. One exception to this is that titles that are only categorized in the Publisher Resources category may contain external links in their title descriptions

Trade Dress: We expect all publishers to respect one another's trade dress, design and motif. It is not acceptable to attempt to copy the look and feel of other publishers' titles.

Front page flooding: It is considered improper to flood the front page (new releases) with many small (or even large) releases on the same day. We will attempt to back-date any more then 2 titles released in one day. If you are going to release several titles at once, please notify us so we can do this quickly. Not only does flooding the front page use all your marketing clout in one shot, it has been proven that more sales are made from regular releases than a large group of them at once.

Leaving Reviews: We would consider it an abuse of the review system if you were to leave reviews of your own titles on site. Similarly, anyone with a professional relationship with you (for example authors, illustrators, etc.) leaving reviews of your titles, especially reviews of titles to which they contributed would also be considered an abuse of the marketplace review system. Leaving low reviews of competitor publishers' titles is also not tolerated. The review system is intended to capture the opinions of independent customers only. We periodically check for instances of review abuse and have suspended publishers from our marketplace for such abuse.